15 New Tech Products to Make Your Week More Productive

Are you constantly scouring the Internet and the App Store for the most innovative new apps, tools, and websites to test out and share with your friends? Then look no further. Each week, we review the crowdsourced links posted to a website called Product Hunt, where users post their best finds. Each day, the community discusses and votes for its favorite new apps and tools, and often developers and founders chime in to answer questions and gather feedback. (In case you missed it, here’s last week’s edition.) Between 600 and 800 venture capitalists reportedly use the site — a great testament to its ability to surface products that would otherwise fly under most people’s radars.

Product Hunt offers a look at what’s new every day on its homepage, and anyone can submit a product for others to comment on and upvote. Users can either sign up for emails to be updated on the community’s best finds or can check back each day to see what turns up. The products posted each day collect upvotes, which partially factor into the order in which the posts are ranked at the end of the day.

Each day’s posts are kept separate from the next so that users can return to look back at what’s been popular over the past week or month, or check the site daily to see what’s new. Each listing includes a link to the product’s website and often contains other related links, like its page in the App Store or recent media coverage. Users can join a discussion in the comments section for each product, and founders often join in on the conversation to answer questions or solicit feedback from early adopters.

We looked at the top-ranked new apps and innovations on Product Hunt last week and checked out the top two products that surfaced each day. (We added a bonus one to make 15, including the product with the most upvotes that wasn’t in first or second place on the day it was posted.) Upvote counts do change constantly, but all of ours were recorded as of the time of writing on Monday.

Source: Itunes.apple.com

1. Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift came in first on Sunday, with 479 upvotes as of Monday. The free iTunes U course is offered by Stanford’s School of Engineering and teaches students to build iPhone and iPad apps using the iOS SDK. The course covers user interface design for mobile devices, user interactions with multitouch technologies, object-oriented design using model-view-controller paradigm, memory management, animation, mobile device power management, multi-threading, and performance considerations.

Source: Stash.minddiaper.com

2. Stash

Stash came in second on Sunday, with 164 upvotes as of Monday. Stash is an iOS app that gives users a quick and easy way to save their app ideas. To save an idea, users choose an app category, add a working title, and describe the idea in enough detail that they’ll remember it later. They can then “stash” the idea to revisit later and view their ideas in list or icon view for quick and clear reference. Ideas can also be edited and saved as necessary.

Source: Bjango.com/mac/skalacolor

3. Skala Color for Mac

Skala Color for Mac came in first on Saturday, with 243 upvotes as of Monday. Skala Color is an OS X color picker for designers and developers, and works with a wide variety of formats covering “everything you’re likely to need for web, iOS, Android, and OS X development,” like Hex, CSS RGBA, CSS HSLA, UIColor, NSColor, and more. Skala Color recognizes colors copied to the clipboard, presents them as a swatch that can be applied with one click, and features hue and opacity sliders that enable users to quickly target rough values and then fine tune with four times the precision. Skala Color is a standard OS X color picker and works with most Mac apps. It’s being offered free to help spread the word about the upcoming Skala design tool.

Source: Userbrain.net

4. Userbrain

Userbrain came in second on Saturday, with 177 upvotes as of Monday. The site provides usability testing services for website owners. Markus Pirker, a UX designer at Userbrain, said on Product Hunt, “Not only is usability testing still way too expensive to be done on a regular basis, it’s also impractical to watch hours and hours of videos, before you get actionable results.” Userbrain helps developers make a habit of testing their websites’ usability. To have their website tested weekly, developers enter their website and write a user task. Real first-time users then test the website, and the developer gets videos each week of people using the website on different devices and completing the task the developer wants tested.

Source: Requestsforstartups.com

5. Requests for Startups

Requests for Startups came in first on Friday, with 668 upvotes as of Monday. Requests for Startups is a daily newsletter of startup ideas that investors, companies, and influencers would like to fund. The newsletter is hand-curated daily and was inspired by Y-Combinator’s “Requests for Startups.” Jeff Morris Jr., one of three founders behind the project, notes on Product Hunt that while the platform is starting with ideas from venture capitalists and angel investors, it will eventually evolve into an open platform “for everyone to add their own ideas.” He further explained that “RFS will help existing startups find the right investors for their ideas, and will also help entrepreneurs discover their next big idea. Likewise, it’ll help investors manage opportunistic inbound and proprietary deal flow.”

6. Slack with Your Users

Slack with Your Users came in second on Friday, with 373 upvotes as of Monday. Slack with Your Users enables app developers to interact with their customers via Slack. They can message customers, diagnose issues, gather feedback, provide help, and keep their team in the loop. When a user sends a message from a developer’s app, SupportKit will alert a Slack channel to the message. Then, a member of the team clicks the alert to go to a new channel specific to the user and start speaking to him or her.

Source: Whatsim.com

7. WhatSim

WhatSim came in first on Thursday, with 380 upvotes as of Monday. WhatSim is a SIM card that includes unlimited global WhatsApp chatting for €10 a year. To share multimedia messages — including photos, videos, voice messages, and to share their location and contacts — users can purchase a €5 recharge, which enables them to exchange 50 photos, 10 videos, or 200 voice messages in most countries. WhatSim connects to more than 400 operators in about 150 countries and is a regular, micro, and nano SIM in one.

Source: Nativetap.io

8. NativeTap.io

NativeTap.io came in second on Thursday, with 436 upvotes as of Monday. NativeTap helps developers test and debug their apps on real mobile devices. Users can access any real mobile device remotely via NativeTap’s tablet app for iOS and Android, and interact with it using touch as if it were USB-connected to their computer. They can choose from a variety of devices — new and old, mobile and smartwatches — and access them whenever and wherever they need it. NativeTap supports iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows for both testing and bug fixing.

Source: Web.whatsapp.com

9. WhatsApp Web

WhatsApp Web came in first on Wednesday, with 346 upvotes as of Monday. WhatsApp Web is WhatsApp’s newly released Web client, which has caused some controversy due to its compatibility with just one Web browser (Google Chrome), its incompatibility with iOS, and its requirement that the paired smartphone also be active and connected to the Internet. The client currently works in Google Chrome and is compatible with Android, BlackBerry, BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone, and Nokia S60 phones with the latest version of WhatsApp installed. Users scan a QR code with their phone to log in.

Source: Context.io

10. Context.IO

Context.IO came in second on Wednesday, with 388 upvotes as of Monday. Context.IO provides an API to help developers “build awesome things with email.” The service’s website explains that it “takes the pain out of syncing email data with your app so you can focus on what makes your product great.” The API enables developers to retrieve the conversations, collaboration, and document exchanges that happen daily in email and leverage it in applications like CRM, document management, collaboration, productivity tools, and project management.

Source: Remoteinternships.com

11. Remote Internships

Remote Internships came in first on Tuesday, with 775 upvotes as of Monday. Remote Internships is a weekly newsletter that connects young professionals with one- to three-month remote internships at global tech startups. Users can sign up to be updated on the details of internships that are both remote and paid, and startups can connect with more than 4,000 young professionals seeking to improve their skills via an internship.

Source: Userflowpatterns.com

12. User Flow Patterns

User Flow Patterns came in second on Tuesday, with 296 upvotes as of Monday. User Flow Patterns curates a growing collection of user flow videos for actions like commenting, exploring, onboarding, and searching. The site was created by front-end developer Ramy Khuffash, who started the site when he realized it could be useful to save and organize videos of user flow patterns in well-designed apps.

Source: Cloudconvert.com

13. CloudConvert

CloudConvert came in first on January 19, with 424 upvotes as of Monday. CloudConvert aims to enable users to “convert anything to anything” and supports more than 200 different audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet, and presentation file formats. Most conversion types support advanced options, and the site also supports batch converting, merging from multiple files, and archive packing. The file conversion is completed in the cloud and the files are deleted as soon as the conversion is finished.

Source: Event Hunt

14. Event Hunt

Event Hunt came in second on January 19, with 391 upvotes as of Monday. Event Hunt aggregates startups and tech events curated by locals and was designed as a “Product Hunt like platform for people who want to socialise, learn new things, get new opportunities (investors, free business advise) in the area they are in and also to help to get to know people when they move to a new location.”

15. Handle

Handle came in third on Friday, with 389 upvotes as of Monday. Handle helps users stay focused by bringing email, to-do’s, and calendars into one place so that they can make better decisions about how to manage their time. The Handle Timeline displays only what the user can work on at a given moment based on his or her location, time, events, and priorities. Users can set reminders to grab their attention at a specific time or place, create events and set due dates based on their schedule, and make progress on long-term goals by grouping to-do’s into projects.